History
id Tech 4 began as an enhancement to id Tech 3. During development, it was initially just a complete rewrite of the engine's renderer, while still retaining other subsystems, such as file access, and memory management. The decision to switch from C to the C++ programming language necessitated a restructuring and rewrite of the rest of the engine; today, while id Tech 4 contains code from id Tech 3, much of it has been rewritten.
At the QuakeCon 2007, John Carmack, the lead graphics engine developer at id, said to LinuxGames: "I mean, I won't commit to a date, but the Doom 3 stuff will be open source". And like its predecessors, John Carmack has said that id Tech 4 will be released as open source.
At the QuakeCon 2009, Carmack said that he planned to petition ZeniMax Media to release the id Tech 4 source upon the release of Rage. As part of his keynote for QuakeCon 2011 he confirmed that the source code to Doom 3 will be out by the end of the year, after the release of Rage.
On November 16, 2011, Carmack announced on Twitter that he's writing new code for Doom 3's open source release, because "lawyers are still skittish about the patent issue around 'Carmack's reverse'". This refers to an implementation of stencil buffered shadow volume algorithms.
On November 22, 2011, Carmack released the Doom 3 source code on Github. The source does not include any of the 'Carmack's Reverse' code. According to Carmack, minor tweaks were made to the code to avoid any infringement.
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